Archives for January 2009

Norwood hopes to rebuild home studio gutted by 2−alarm fire

By Stephen Stirling

At 72, College Point artist John Norwood is predictably bleak when he reflects on losing his home and half of his life’s work in a fire last week.

“I’ve been pretty black about it,” Norwood said, smoke curling out of his mouth from a Marlboro cigarette. “Have you ever lost anything in a fire like that? I’ve been doing this for 50 years now and everything there is lost. It’s all gone.”

Norwood’s home and studio, a 2,000−square−foot converted stable, was completely destroyed when an electrical fire tore through the building Jan. 5. Norwood, the only one home at the time, escaped without injury but about half of the work he has completed in his 50−year painting and sculpting career — as well as all his clothing and furniture — was destroyed in the blaze.

“The weather’s been bleak since it happened. We’ve been out there two, three days in a row talking to insurance people trying to sort out the details of it all. It’s cold. One day it was raining all day,” he said. “It’s been pretty f−−−−−− miserable.”

Norwood and his wife, Ruby, have lived in College Point for the majority of their 37−year marriage. They have owned the home and studio, at 22−12 119th St., for the last 12 years. Norwood said he put about a year’s worth of work into fixing up the home, which was built in the 1920s and overlooks Flushing bay, and he hopes to rebuild.

“They used to have horses here around the back, there was a big hayloft and they used to bring coal in by boat,” he said. “It’s a great view. That’s why I want to stay here. If I live that long, that is.”

Educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, Norwood over the course of his half−century long career has developed a very distinct aesthetic. His paintings and metric−based sculptures are fashioned out of recycled material he finds in his day−to−day life. Mountainous sculptures of packing materials, cardboard boxes, coffee cups and Marlboro cigarettes painted in vibrant colors line a large studio located above his wife’s pediatric offices on 15th Avenue. Inside a towering wall of Plexiglas boxes lie pieces of models from his work at an architectural firm as well as small figurines of Playboy Bunnies from another project he worked on for the adult magazine.

Norwood credits much of the inspiration for his work with several years of traveling through Europe and Asia following his departure from art school in Chicago.

“I left the art institute after I knew everything,” he said. “Me and a friend traveled around for three years just studying art history, palaces, architecture, the people. That’s really where I got my education. I remember I used to trade cigarettes with the Russians while they stood in front of their jets. I’ve lived a pretty interesting life.”

But as he toured a portion of his life’s work, Norwood was clearly preoccupied by what was not there.

“This was a portrait my daughter did of me for her master’s at the New York Academy of Art. She’s also an artist. I thought it was a pretty good piece, but it was destroyed,” he said, pointing to photographs, before motioning upwards at a large, dramatic sculpture. “There was another wall like this that pretty much got all screwed up in the fire.”

But despite all he’s lost, Norwood said there is some light in his life as he and his wife pick up the pieces. Their daughter, Daniella, was expecting her first child this week.

“Now we’re more worried about the baby than the material things,” he said.

Reach reporter Stephen Stirling by e−mail at sstirling@timesledger.com or by phone at 718−229−0300, Ext. 138.

Burned and Listless: Queens Artist Tries To Rebuild Life After Fire

Artist and iconoclast John Norwood toiled away in his studio on another utopian cityscape, an expanse of tiny white buildings atop an ocean of blue. It consumed the recent years of his life.

He stepped upstairs to his College Point home of 35 years and began an egg-based concoction for supper.

Smelling smoke, Norwood returned downstairs to see billowing gray clouds rising from the floor. He attacked them with a fire extinguisher and rolled open the garage door.

Fueled by winter winds and a dubiously cautious response by the Fire Department, flames quickly engulfed the entire building.

His wife, Dr. Ruby Malva, ran over from her pediatric office several blocks away and spent too long calling his name, fearing he was in the smoldering building before her.

She found her husband to the side, in shock after watching their home and a decade’s worth of art burn to nothing.

Now College Point’s little-known 71-year-old painter, sculptor and resident leads the life of a youthful creator, sleeping on floors and piecing together an existence from fragments. But the greater part of life has passed, and what physical evidence he had of it disappeared with the night’s fire.

“I’m feeling very black,” he said with trademark cool, his voice a deep North Carolina drawl, made coarse by Marlboro reds. “I lost everything.”

Books and bottles are scattered across the studio floor. Norwood used the bottles to store various collections of objects.The ceiling collapsed on one of the building’s stairwells. The second floor, where Norwood lived, was completely destroyed.

Norwood’s face doesn’t betray his age; his features are soft with wrinkles too thin to notice. The only indication of wisdom may be atop his head, in the form of a thin mat of ash-grey hair.

The City wants to tear the burnt building down, and various interests have tried to shy him away from rebuilding his home on the second floor. It’s a decision Norwood would like to avoid.

As he and his wife wrestle insurance suits, haggling and fighting to keep their home standing, they spend their nights on an air mattress on the floor of their daughter’s studio just a few blocks away.

“We have to get a place for ourselves, for our mental sanity,” Malva said.

The ceiling collapsed on one of the building’s stairwells. The second floor, where Norwood lived, was completely destroyed.

“It’s a ton of headaches,” Norwood added. “One three-hour fire and the whole world goes to hell.”

When he first moved to the City four decades ago, he acquired the derelict waterfront property and spent a year and a half molding it to his own tastes and design.

“We want to rebuild the place,” Norwood said. “I put so much into it.”

While he exudes nonchalance, Norwood’s friend and fellow artist Tom Black believes it may just be residual shock. The loss is of a grander scale than Norwood wants to admit.

“The place itself was an extension of his artwork. It was a discarded building when he got it and when he finished working it fit him rather neatly,” Black said. “The building itself was a large, live-in sculpture.”

Lost in the formal aspects of recovering from this disaster, Norwood has had an artistic reassessment forced upon him. When asked if he sees this as an opportunity to start over, he responded, “It doesn’t inspire me that much. It’s all rather depressing.”

His age, of course, is a factor but according to Black, the nature of an artist makes this loss nearly unbearable.

“An artist tends to see himself as moving through time. So you discount your work from the past,” he said. Losing his most recent creations is “almost like losing your identity.”

Norwood’s art itself leaves reason for hope. His second studio, which also serves as his wife’s pediatric office, holds thousands of his works. Many are paintings, and the rest are sculptures.

Witness the coffee cups, stacked and sprayed a bright orange and yellow, their lids used in a separate piece. Or the pyramids, redone with cigarette packs instead of bricks, with stubbed-out butts pasted together into bulging piles.

Norwood’s sculptures often repurpose the mundane objects of everyday life to give them renewed meaning.

“I’m infernally abstract,” he said.

Now, Norwood must redefine a building along the water’s edge of College Point, as he did 35 years ago.

Inside, the utopian city Norwood worked on lays burnt and blackened, chaos creeping in among its streets and buildings. Architecture and a surplus of tiny people and buildings inform much of Norwood’s work. He was the former Chief Model Maker for renowned architect I.M. Pei.

A two-alarm fire raced through the home and museum of a College Point artist Tuesday night, probably destroying a collection of his life’s work.

The blaze started in the home around 5:38 p.m. at 22-12 119th St., fire officials said. It completely gutted the two-story structure and continued to burn into an extension of the building after 7:50 p.m., bringing out dozens of curious neighbors who watched it burn.

“I just came home from work and it was mayhem,” said neighbor Carla Fusconi. “It just kept burning. I feel so bad for whoever owns that place because it’s gone.”

No one was injured in the blaze, which required 106 firefighters and 25 vehicles to combat, the FDNY said.

There was no indication how the fire started.

The home, regarded by the Fire Department as a commercial structure, was dedicated to the work of College Point artist John Norwood, who attended the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1950s and had his first exhibition in 1959, according to his Web site. His most recent exhibition was at the Queens Museum of Art in 2001.

Norwood’s favored materials are cigarette butts, coffee cups, wood scraps, Styrofoam packing materials and remnants of models, according to his Web site. “He throws nothing away and eventually everything makes it into his art,” the site says.

“I used to see the people that ran the place every so often,” said Norman Segler, who lives about a block away. “I’d say hi to them in passing but not much else. I know it was used for art. It all must have been lost. It’s sad.”

The museum, which featured a collection of Norwood’s pieces from throughout his career, offered free admission and was open by appointment only.